How to build your vocabulary – and feed the world

A charity website donates rice to the UN every time you choose the correct definition of a word.

from the December 3, 2007 edition

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The difficulty of the words range from common ones like "apt" to more difficult ones like "ruth" (compassion). The site ratchets up the difficulty based on how many definitions a player has chosen correctly. Players strive to work their way up to the highest level of difficulty, 50, but Breen says few players get above 48.

Viral marketing, the compelling game, and the cause it supports are key to the site's success, WFP's Barton says.

An ad is featured on the bottom of each page, and it is these advertisers who ultimately fund the checks Breen writes to the WFP. He is looking into Google ads and hiring an ad agency to run the site. Breen has specified that he wants the WFP to buy locally to support farmers in developing countries, rather than using imported food, which tends to depress local crop prices.

Breen has already sent $113,000 to the WFP and will send more in increments of $10,000 to $15,000 as advertising dollars roll in, Barton says. Breen says he sends all profits to the WFP, and the site has no political or religious affiliation. He donates his time and pays the cost of leasing the site's servers himself. "Some people like to give money to their colleges or whatever," he writes by e-mail, "and this I what I prefer to do with it."

Although Breen spent a considerable amount of time getting the site up and running (not to mention inputting more than 10,000 vocabulary words), he suspects the site can "pretty much run itself" once an ad agency can oversee the ads. He's also hiring a lexicographer to input in some more unusual words so that players won't run out of challenges.

He also operates Poverty.com, which is linked to and promoted by Freerice.com. Poverty.com is an informational site about hunger and includes a tally of the estimated number of deaths from hunger every day – an average he puts at 25,000. Breen also encourages visitors to print and sign a form letter to their governments to encourage them to allocate 0.7 percent of annual income to poverty relief. (The United States, for example, currently gives 0.17 percent.)

Hunger is an increasingly difficult issue for Americans to identify with, Barton says, "with obesity getting so much attention in the media."

"People have this pent-up urge to help. They want to be active if you give them the opportunity," Breen says.

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